“Ping!” goes the epigram as it bounces off the wall of a London university professor’s office. “Zing!” goes the zinger, whizzing across the room.

In the uneasy revival of Simon Gray’s “Butley” (1971), which opened last night at the Booth Theater, Nathan Lane fires off witticisms as if they were silver bullets with “Made in England” engraved upon their sides.

“Lust is no excuse for thoughtlessness,” snaps Mr. Lane, as Ben Butley, the suicidally clever title character of Mr. Gray’s fine dramatic portrait of a man drowning in bad faith. Or: “She told me that if I was half a man, I’d leave, but on discovering that she was, she left herself.”

Mr. Lane being Mr. Lane, one of the best comic marksmen in the theater, he repeatedly hits the bull’s-eye that automatically sets off an audience’s laughter. Somehow, though, the lines seem to exist independent of the character who speaks them. They sparkle and sometimes even sting.

This is not the same as their being vapors in a toxic fog given off by a soul rotting in its own unhappiness. Ben Butley, who was indelibly created by Alan Bates on the London stage and on Broadway three decades ago, is in essence less the target shooter that Mr. Lane gives us than a slow-leaking human dirty bomb.

If you happen to be an American Anglophile looking for a night at the theater to confirm your belief that no one quips more elegantly than a witty Brit, then Nicholas Martin’s production may well be the show for you. But if you were expecting a seamless, emotionally stirring marriage between a first-rate actor and a first-rate play, then “Butley” disappoints.

It’s not that the elements for such a marriage don’t exist. Though Mr. Lane is best known as a king of musical comedy (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “The Producers”), there has never been any doubt that he also has the gift of showing us exactly where it hurts. In Terrence McNally’s “Lisbon Traviata” and Jon Robin Baitz’s “Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or ‘Schmucks’,” he brilliantly embodied self-lacerating characters who wield humor like a double-sided razor blade.

Mr. Martin, who staged “Butley” with Mr. Lane for the Huntington Theater Company in Boston three years ago, is the director who subversively applied the rhythms of drawing-room comedy to shed light on the darkness of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in a 2001 Broadway production. “Butley” would seem to be just his cup of tainted tea. But as Butley himself remarks, “Our beginnings never know our ends.”

This production has moments that hint at the “Butley” that might have been, brief glimpses afforded by Mr. Lane of pure pain and savagery that make you sit up and go “Whoa!” It seems telling that most of these moments are silent. For this “Butley” is one of those Broadway shows that achieves a state of paralyzing self-consciousness by trying to live up to its English accent.

Everyone in the cast, with two prominent exceptions, is plagued by an affliction that might be called the Importance of Sounding British, which causes actors to speak with the corseted plumminess associated with American productions of comedies by Wilde and Coward. This disease plays a large role in preventing the production from achieving the effortless-seeming continuity of a life being lived (and gutted) before our eyes.

Photo

From left, Nathan Lane, Dana Ivey and Julian Ovenden in "Butley."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Butley” portrays a few hours of the destructive games that its title character plays in his office (designed with appropriately oppressive squalor by Alexander Dodge), dodging tutorials with eager students; baiting friends, enemies, lovers and colleagues, and hiding from hurtful facts. A once promising scholar of T. S. Eliot, whose large photograph hovers reproachfully over his desk, Butley has become a heavy-drinking, work-shirking, barb-wielding mess who could step without missing a beat into the nasty late-night rituals of another play set in academe, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Like “Virginia Woolf,” “Butley” occurs in continuous real time (interrupted only by the intermission), and it has a nearly Aristotelian precision of classical structure. As Butley observes of the symmetry of the events and encounters of his day, “We’re preserving the unities.”

What’s so wonderful about Mr. Gray’s script is how naturally the unities fall into place and how inevitably yet stealthily self-knowledge descends upon its protagonist (as long as we’re being Aristotelian). To be effective, the play must flow like one single polluted stream, as Butley engages in a series of word-driven battles with combatants who include his estranged wife, Anne (Pamela Gray), and his roomate, office mate and academic protégé, Joseph Keyston (Julian Ovenden).

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Martin’s production feels too visibly articulated; you can see the joints that move the action. Ideally, Butley’s sustained rant about his life — a rant compounded of bright remarks, vicious digs and recitations whose sources run from Shakespeare to Beatrix Potter — should shape the play into a sort of acrid miasma, only occasionally pierced by light.

But Mr. Lane acts in fits and starts. When he finds a natural emotional groove, he can be breathtaking. He is genuinely shocking in the scene where breezy banter with his wife abruptly shifts into stormy viciousness.

He finds the compelling competitive rhythms in Butley’s dialogue with the young publisher (Darren Pettie) who is his rival for the domination of Joey. And in the mostly wordless sequences that begin and end “Butley,” Mr. Lane exudes an air of comic frustration and misery (the ratio shifts from the first scene to the last) that reminds you of how fine the line is between farce and tragedy.

Most of the supporting performances have the leadenness of characters being impersonated instead of embodied. But Mr. Ovenden, a British actor making his Broadway debut, smoothly conveys the craven passivity and eagerness to please of a young academic destined to be ruled by mentors.

And the invaluable Dana Ivey once again turns a nominally small role into a production’s emotional touchstone. Ms. Ivey portrays Edna Shaft, a spinster professor in love with Byron’s poetry and alarmed by the Byronic excesses she sees in her students, who could easily have been a pinched, unsavory cartoon.

Yet when Edna talks about randomly looking through her recently completed book on Byron — with each page summoning a specific memory of what she was doing when she wrote it — Ms. Ivey summons a complete landscape of a lonely life. It says much about the imbalance of this production that this briefly exposed vista of solitude speaks more eloquently and devastatingly of Butley’s future than most of what the play’s title character has to offer.

Related Coverage

When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed play or musical through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. But our primary goal is that this feature adds value to your reading experience.